Mar. 30th, 2008

01:18 pm - I'm going to be giving a talk on IPv6!

I've never done anything like that before, but I feel pretty confident I'll be able to pull it off well. I've been in situations a few times in front of a whole ton of people and haven't done poorly, and this will be an exercise in high geekery and so I should be fine.

I signed up for the bus sponsored by pogo linux, but if anybody is going and feels up for giving me a ride, that would be really good.

Comments:

I've had an IPv6 tunnel to Hurricane Electric for the past few years (though something's been slightly screwy with the routing lately). Whenever I change my net service I ask after IPv6 connectivity but so far no luck with local people. (Though it's an OK litmus for whether the ISP has any clue at all, if they seem to understand what I'm asking for.)

I've given up on asking after multicast connectivity— after reading the ietf mcast lists for a couple years I decided that multicast in its original conception really does violate the end-to-end principle.

I've been using 6to4. One of the neatest things I discovered was http://6to4.nro.net/. If you visit that place when using a 6to4 IPv6 address it lets you set up nameservers for the PTR records for your 6to4 address block.

I should polish up the little Python program I have that looks up various bits of information about IPv6 addresses. For example it progressively chops off digits in the PTR lookup until it gets an answer. It looks up the IPv4 address associated with a 6to4 address and various other things.

I wrote it when I discovered a lot of incoming IPv6 connections from addresses in the 6to4 block with a certain pattern to their addresses. I was curious and starting using a whole number of tools (nmap for example) to try to figure out what was up. I discovered that most of them seemed to be Windows boxes.

Oh right, I'd forgotten about 6to4. When I tried it a few years ago it was really slow — the two gateways I could get to work were in Norway and Japan, I think, and apparently not on very fat pipes. Looks like there are more gateways now?

Hurricane Electric gives out free ipv6 tunnels and /64 delegations, which work pretty well, and are reasonably fast. Not that I actually generate much v6 traffic.

6to4, slow? Well.... sort of

Well, right now, thanks to me, Speakeasy isn't half bad. Thanks to me the routing was fixed awhile back to stop sending all the packets to the Netherlands first. Also, most IPv6 routing tables out there now seem very keen on getting 6to4 packets of the IPv6 Internet and onto the IPv4 one ASAP, which actually helps performance a fair amount.

The Speakeasy story is funny:

I opened a ticket with them about the problem mentioning that 192.88.99.1 was the 6to4 anycast address.

I send a message to the upstream that 192.88.99.1 goes through and tell them about the problem.

I believe in this time the Slashdot article about how we're all going to die if we don't switch to IPv6 right now comes out. (For the record, I felt the article was actually really good and well intentioned, and the alarmist tone was probably necessary to beat things into people's thick skulls).

2 weeks later I get a nice reply back telling me they fixed it.

I log another support ticket with Speakeasy basically telling them that I did their work for them and explaining that special casing 192.88.99.1/24 would be a really smart move.

They log a really contrite response to the ticket thanking me and asking if maybe it can be closed now?

I don't close it.

I just checked, and I think they have special cased it, or at least someone has published a much nicer route. They now send the packet to HE in San Francisco. HE dinks around with it entirely too much and sends it to Chicago (48ms away from San Francisco) before it gets on their IPv6 backbone, but it's still better than the other route.

I should probably go back to Speakeasy and close the ticket now. Foisting it off on HE in San Francisco is a really excellent choice if they don't have their own IPv6 backbone. Maybe I'll complain to HE and ask them why they send 6to4 packets from San Francisco to Chicago before doing anything useful with them.